Object! On the Documentary as Art – Session 3

Panel presentations and discussion with Stephen Connolly, Judy Price, and Sasha Litvintseva on documentary images as traces, their fictions and materiality embedded equally in the production and extraction of histories.

On the Media Geology of Zabriskie Point (Redacted) – Stephen Connolly

This presentation looks to the film Zabriskie Point (Redacted) (2013), shot in Death Valley at the original movie location of Michelangelo Antonioni 1970s fiction film titled Zabriskie Point. Zabriskie Point (Redacted) reconsiders representation as activity and process, moving across fictive and documentary strata. This talk considers how the film activates ideas of the geological in the film’s mimesis and discontinuity. -SC

Quarries of Wandering Forms – Judy Price

Objects are not inert or mute; they tell stories and describe trajectories.

In Quarries of Wandering Forms Judy Price discusses her film White Oil (2014), which was filmed in the quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and reveals a complex set of geopolitical relations between worker, owner, land, military, nationalist identities and sovereign state. Through discursive layers she excavates how the quarried limestone can be perceived as a cipher for the biography of the collective worker, that acts as an archive for their personal histories and experiences as well as the changing landscape bringing to bear the myriad losses of land, economy and history. – JP

This presentation centres on two films that unsettle the dichotomies of subject/object, nature/culture and evidence/fiction. Asbestos (2016) is a study of the transformation of asbestos’ extraction from the earth to extraction from the walls; it asks how both filming and the use of found footage can be thought of as forms of extraction: extracting images from forms and from contexts. Evergreen (2014) is a fictional story entirely constructed from documentary footage, which searches for a landscape’s own voice amid a cacophony of spectacle and image-making. – SL–